Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday November 09, 2015 @11:06PM
from the talk-to-the-bobs dept.

ErichTheRed writes: A company called Cengage Learning now joins the Toys 'R Us, Disney and Southern California Edison IT offshoring club. Apparently, even IT workers in low-cost parts of the country are too expensive and their work is being sent to Cognizant, one of the largest H-1B visa users. As a final insult, the article describes a pretty humiliating termination process was used. Is it time to think about a professional organization before IT goes the way of manufacturing?

If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.

If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.

You too will soon be "outsourced" and regret your opinion. I'll smile at you as I walk into Wal-Mart.

After being laid off from the best job in the world as a DBA that paid more than I had even made, I took a much lower paying job with the Air Force, and am now a "career civil servant". Sure, I'm not making the "big money" anymore, but I have a much better health plan then you will ever have, and my job will never go away.

WTF are you talking about?! Tier 3 and 4 (specialized) jobs are being outsourced to India too. If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways. Anything from networking, Windows/*nix administration, to running the entire enterprise VMWare stack; all of it going overseas. About the only thing that remains is executive staff and grunts that rack-n-stack equipment in a data center.

Much like manufacturing: the offshoring is a temporary measure while automation replaces human workers. Meanwhile, the companies that provide the clouds are paying top dollar for US talent. Food for thought.

The automation is in the US factories. US manufacturing output has never fallen, decade-over-decade. US factories have become more and more automated first as jobs went overseas, and now China is seeing declines in outsourced-from-US jobs, as the robots are taking over and manufacturing increasingly returns to the US, job-free. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from the US was a temporary measure, slowly dwindling.

IT is at the front of this curve (unless you're a software dev, but I don't think of that as "IT"). The writing has been on the wall for years, and the destination is inevitable. Plan accordingly.

This is what technology is: efficiency. This has been happening for over 300 years, it's not going to stop now.

Except for in steel, which is an interesting case study of how having a protected industry may help in the very short term but really fucks you up in the long run. What remains of the US steel industry is almost of interest to archeologists - steel produced at huge cost while the rest of the world has pushed on with automation resulting in both lower costs and higher quality. With no incentive to spend the capital on automation (protected market) the result was stagnation.Ironically some manufacturing moved offshore to get cheap steel.

We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a week to start with a slow slide down to say 20 from that. Just to make automation fit in better while softening the blow of people going on welfare / disability. Also need some kind of basic income system to replace disability / welfare / etc.

Now there is some abuse of disability / welfare but some times the system penalizes work in a way that people are better off not working. Or in other

> If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways.

if you believe this then i have a bridge to sell you:)

i've worked for countless companies over the years that have tried to outsource to India (and China, and the Philippines, etc.) and every single one of those projects was a disaster. the majority of those programmers are nothing but bad code monkeys who write terrible code and even worse documentation. the ones worth hiring are getting top dollar themselves. then you get to try to coordinate a project with people on the other side of the planet and who are 12 hours off from your work day. if you want to make it work you need to send some of your people over there to actually lead the team- and even then the results are rarely worth the trouble. the main problem- at least to India and China- is that they're often taught through rote memorization. if a problem comes up that requires a novel solution, or if you are trying to troubleshoot an obscure issue- they lack the skills to solve the problem.

you'll get much better (higher quality and far more creative) work when you outsource to places like Poland and Ukraine- but then you often run into language barriers.

for every company that outsources- there are 10 new startups looking to hire people.

people have been sounding the death knell for IT workers in the US for the last 20+ years. if you think it's going to happen any time soon- well- let's just say I'm not going to hold my breath:)

Duh! We don't have a trickle-down or trickle-up economy anymore; either one would be preferred to the "trickle-out" that we have now as it least moves money in the system. No, our nation is (and has been for quite some time now) been hemorrhaging wealth overseas. Meanwhile, our national debt is growing at warp speeds and when it finally crashes, the nation, "the union" as you know it dissolves. And as for China and everyone else, they can all go fuck themselves as there won't be an dollars to collect on!

If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.

Also have a look at this, which lists the 33 jobs most likely to be outsourced...noting that many of them pay quite well indeed. Or did. They probably don't anymore.http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta... [theatlantic.com]

To put it all in context, you may want to consider the quantity of jobs being outsourced - which is in the millions:http://www.statisticbrain.com/... [statisticbrain.com]

Part of the reason those are through the roof is that they have very good lobbying arms. The people who actually run the country (unlike the Dems claim, it isn't the 1%, it's more like the top 20-25% who make $100k. The basis of their power is they always vote, even in odd-year-Mayoral elections, the cheating bastards) distrust unions, so actual unions are quite restricted. But Doctors and lawyers are key components of the hundredthousandocracy, can quite clearly and cogently defend their interests, and arrange it so that even proposals designed largely to screw them (ie: anything that reduces health costs, any form of Tort Reform) don't do that shit.

There are 4 millionish [pewresearch.org] IT Workers in the US. If a few hundred thousand organized themselves into an association, hired lobbyists in every state and in DC (or, more likely, hired some of their members to lobby), they would be quite powerful. They aren't a union, so the GOP won't go into crazy-kill-death mode. Unlike Zuckerberg or San Fran tech entrepreneurs, they look and act like the suburban white-collar types who dominate the country. They say "we want these contracts investigated because we think that the rules weren't followed," and no politician has the stones to get in the fucking way.

Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?

Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.

History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.

That was in 2004. As digitization has spread through healthcare, the practice has only gotten more prevalent.

If you can pipe the data to somewhere else and get someone accredited to sign off on your work so they are the professional of record, you can outsource anything to anyone anywhere. Use a nurse practitioner for in-office visits, outsource case review to a medical professional somewhere else.

Same deal for lawyers. For contracts, research, etc. you can outsource to paralegals. For discovery, have someone else scan, index, and cross correlate everything before you turn it over to the junior partners, but bill at the senior rate.

Have you EVER shopped for doctors based on price? Did you even know that was a thing? Docs just seem to set a price based on whatever, and you and your insurance company figure it out from there.

General practitioners/family doctors could be in every strip mall for in and out service, yet they're not. Anything outside of routine service would go to a specialist which you would pay closer to current market rate for, but the AMA has closely limited the number of doctors in America. I looked at getting a medical degree to go work in third world countries, but they've raised the barrier of entry by charging about half a million dollars in tuition, plus 6-7 years worth of apprenticeship to enter the field. Plus entry tests, etc. The tuition and time alone makes me look elsewhere for a profession.

If you brought down the standard for med school training for general practitioners, you could easily outsource about 60% of general doctor health care. In fact, to meet this gap they have a Physician's Assistant (PA) who is effectively a doctor with a much shorter training schedule at about 90% pay level.

When I was a teenager I ended up having my tonsils removed. The doctor thought they looked "funny" and sent off to pathology. Pathology came back and said "lymphoma". So we got to go visit the pediatric oncologist who started doing blood tests, bone marrow samples, and scans looking for cancer.

They were going to crack my chest open to put a center line and start chemo. But the oncologist thought things weren't adding up. I wasn't sick enough. So he ordered a DNA test for the ebstein bar virus (mono). That test came back positive when three other of the regular mono tests came back negative. Apparently mono can look identical to lymphoma under a microscope.

The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.

Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?

Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.

History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.

Unions have been unable to oppose outsourcing because the Republicans have destroyed union power over the last 50 years or so. So called "right to work" legislation and other forms of legal (and illegal) union busting resulted in lower union membership, which means lower amounts of political donations and smaller voting blocks. The end game on this is Citizens United which means that the American oligarchy can spend as much dark money as they want to buy as much political power as they can get. Money doesn't always buy elections or politicians, but if one side outspends their opponents by large enough amounts for a long enough period of time they can change the rules of the game. Which they did.

Here is a example from blue collar middle America. In the Midwest food processing, such as meat packing, used to be unionized. The unions were pretty much wiped out by the Republicans. Who got those jobs? Undocumented workers, mostly Spanish speakers. It's not like citizens went from being union workers to non-union workers. Citizens were replaced by non-citizens because they were less expensive to start out with, and undocumented workers will never complain about illegal treatment or dangerous working conditions. That's why there are so may relatively new Spanish speaking communities in places like Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc. And it's also why Trump is able to scream about "illegals" and get so much traction. The real perpetrators are the Republicans and massive corrupt big business interests.

If you haven't lost your job yet it's just because they haven't gotten around to you yet.

First, the unions killed themselves. They became rich and powerful while solving the problems they were created to solve, and then the bosses decided they wanted to stay rich and powerful, so they couldn't fade away when their work was done. They abandoned fighting for their workers in favor of fighting for mandatory dues. Populist organizations, like unions, must support the people that support the organization. When they stop, they weaken. If they also turn evil...

One problem with unions is they pit Americans against Americans. When an automaker wants to open a factory in the South, which is still America btw, the unions protest. So they are too extreme in their protectionism and that pisses off a lot of people. Same with Boeing, they wanted to build their next plane in like Tennessee or something, the unions went on strike.

The other big perceptional problem is that unions protect lazy and ineffective workers. Protecting against unfair business practices is one thing

One problem with unions is they pit Americans against Americans. When an automaker wants to open a factory in the South, which is still America btw, the unions protest. So they are too extreme in their protectionism and that pisses off a lot of people. Same with Boeing, they wanted to build their next plane in like Tennessee or something, the unions went on strike.

The other big perceptional problem is that unions protect lazy and ineffective workers. Protecting against unfair business practices is one thing, but the stereotype of the union requiring 3 guys standing around watching 1 guy dig and 1 guy hold a "SLOW" sign (road construction) is just too damning. That's not what we need or want, because once again, that goes beyond protecting Americans and into dividing us. Paying 4x the labor cost (for that example) is a cost that the rest of us have to absorb, and that sucks. Then people start thinking, "Oh, I know why high speed rail is so goddamn expensive... fucking unions!" And they have a point. It's really unions plus excessive environmentalism.

If you have ever benefited from anything on that list then you should stop whining about unions and start realizing that without organized workers standing up for themselves the middle class is going to join the lower class in being ignorant and dirt poor.

This. Probably most of the anti-union sentiment in this dicussion was ingrained via lifelong propaganda. I don't think it's a Right/Left thing. In the so-called "whitecollar" world, unions are particularly repulsive because "bluecollar" has such a negative connotation. Why?

If a "professional organization" means some sort of stupid union, then no. Unions did not prevent outsourcing of US jobs, and cannot. The reality is, if you want substandard work on the cheap, you're always going to get that in India. As my boss says of our products, "(software) products without revenue are built in India, products that make money are built in the US".

We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.

We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.

What does that single US worker cost, how does that compare to the cost of hiring three Indians, and how profitable is outsourcing in the mid-to-long term? These are the factors that will determine whether this situation will continue to get worse.

What does that single US worker cost, how does that compare to the cost of hiring three Indians, and how profitable is outsourcing in the mid-to-long term? These are the factors that will determine whether this situation will continue to get worse.

I'm sorry, "mid-to-long term"? What does that have to do with the next round of bonuses for the folks making the outsourcing decisions?

Professional associations certainly do protect jobs. Unless you're a member of the right association, you can't be a civil engineer, doctor, lawyer, plumber, electrician, etc. Companies aren't going to import workers and then support them for a year or two while they can't practice their profession.

That's funny, I know people who have changed countries to continue working as a doctor, a lawyer, and a civil engineer (with some retraining on local law in each case).

What makes those jobs different is important: by their nature, you can't do them remotely. A lot of the medical industry has moved off shore, but not the part that requires direct patient interaction. Working in the trades is a great way to never be offshored, and unions have nothing to do with it: no one's going to sit in India and wire your house, or fix a busted sewer pipe. There's significant immigration into all those jobs, but it's absorbed naturally.

America and immigration go together, get used to it. The problem with the H1-B system is its awkward, non-tenure-track nature. Have an B1-B automatically become a green card in 2 years, and the wage problem will be solved.

Indian education is primarily by rote, they don't actually promote independent thinking or out of the box thinking. This is true in general asia, where they believe as a younger person, you can't question the elder person. That kind of thinking creates an uneven power structure where the best ideas don't necessarily rise up like they do in western countries. So, until Asian countries learn to depose of centuries of ingrained thinking, the U.S. worker will always trump an Indian one or chinese one.

Sure there are going to be exceptions, but on the whole, a U.S. worker is more productive than a Indian one and also will be able to focus on and solve complex problems. Now, some of the Indians know this and have gone back to India and is trying to fix that, but it isn't going to be easy because of the cultural and corrupt institutions in place. But who knows?

As a person who had some exposure to both school systems, (with primarily in the U.S. education), I'll pick an American worker every time. Hell, if I was in India I would try to get an American worker because I know for my money, I'm going to get a lot more value.

Our politicians don't care about the American worker. Our corporations and their willing yes-men lackeys don't care about the American worker.

But the American worker cares about the American worker, and together our shared interests can at least give us a "bargaining stick." Of course we need to be ready to swing the stick if need be to show that it's a real stick and all.

And when the American company of empowered workers goes to compete with foreign company offering the same services for 1/3 the cost what "bargaining stick" will the American company have to win that business?

And here we go...the Race To The Bottom for American jobs. Yippee, thanks Corporate America!

I recommend learning a skill or trade that can't be outsourced. Something that's hands-on, or something that most foreign workers simply can't do very well. (Tech writing and actual physical service work come to mind, but I'm sure there are others.)

This trend won't stop until outsourced workers cost enough to make it economical to hire US workers, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Re "I recommend learning a skill or trade that can't be outsourced."
Many try for a security clearance. Contractors, lawyers can often be "the no bid US company" with a long global supply chain of just in time products sold to the US gov or mil.
The paper work is perfect, the products 100% made, owned and security cleared in the USA. Just the actual US workers jobs are all gone.
Re "This trend won't stop until outsourced workers cost enough to make it economical to hire US workers, but I don't see that h

Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.

Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.

Society thrives when wealth is well distributed. "Free markets" are a race to the bottom in slow motion. Eventually everyone who is not rich will be sleeping on dirt floors. You better believe that they are going to be really pissed off about it.

Society thrives when wealth is well distributed. "Free markets" are a race to the bottom in slow motion.

Actually it's working as promised, it's just that the poor overseas are benefiting more than those here in the US. Eventually all sources of labor would equalize in price and then we'd have wage pressure like what happened prior to globalization. The problem is that automation technology is advancing so quickly that prior to full equalization most workers will have zero marginal utility.

How many of them drive cars with foreign name plates? I have a friend who lost his job to someone from India a couple years ago. While we sat at his kitchen table I looked out his front windows at the two Toyota Prii that sat there. I was too polite to say anything.

I don't want to downplay the issue. But... market forces and cheap labor. There are a WHOLE lot of Americans in Vietnam, Korea, China, and South Africa tooling up their auto plants and teaching them to be competitive. Welcome to the real world. H1-B Visas are a red herring, and the sooner IT folks realize it, the better. The bigger problem is all the jobs that are going overseas - but there isn't a fix to that.

Toyota Prius are built in Japan, but the following Toyota cars are built in the US for the US market: Avalon, Avalon Hybrid, Camry, Camry Hybrid, Corolla, Highlander, Highlander Hybrid, Sequoia, Sienna, Solara, Tacoma, Tundra, and Venza.

If you are an American, with all the benefits that citizenship entails - education, infrastructure, living conditions, security, stable government, rule of law, material and spiritual abundance - that make you the envy of the rest of the planet... why the hell can you not compete with third-world peasants, struggling against oppressive governments, scarcity of resources, illiterate parents, crime and pollution?

The rote IT jobs that are best suited for labor arbitrage outsourcing are also the ones that should just be automated out of existence anyway or handled auto-magically by your cloud provider. The remaining jobs are the ones where close collaboration with the business makes them far more effective and those are going to be ones that you're going to regret offshoring.

The number of jobs that don't fall into either of those buckets is getting smaller by the day. It's hard to see how this kind of outsourcing has

I already see the posts coming in saying "No union for me, thanks, I can take care of myself." I honestly used to think that, back when companies were only outsourcing routine tasks and qualified people were still being treated well everywhere. All I can say is, just wait until you're 40 or end up at one of these places offshoring their entire IT department. I am incredibly lucky and (for now) have a great senior-level position doing systems engineering work. However, between age discrimination, the loss of entry-level work, and the relentless drive to offshore anything that costs real money, we run the risk of driving talented people away from IT.

Here's my idea -- form a profession similar to the one engineers have and a related trade guild, not a traditional labor union. Unions will never fly with the Libertarian, lone wolf, I'm-better-than-everyone-in-my-field crowd. It would have to be structured around the professional licensure model, like the AMA. The AMA and related organizations keep doctors employed and making serious money. How do they do this?- Limiting labor supply by not allowing new medical school slots to be opened- Paying for laws their members need passed, such as forcing recent health care reform to rely on the insurance model that keeps their reimbursement rates high- Ensuring quality of profession members by licensing new medical school grads, and training them through residency and fellowship programs- Requiring continuing education

I would say the biggest benefit to members of the profession would be standardizing basic education. I'm not talking about handing Microsoft or Oracle or Google the reins, I'm talking about making sure people understand the fundamentals of IT and development, not just how to feed code into the magic black box. This would mean evil tradesy things like apprenticeships and OJT for new members, but it would ensure that we wouldn't get the typical MCSE bootcamp or coder academy graduates who only know one way to solve a problem.

The first step beyond getting people to agree would be to basically do what the other professional organizations do -- take up a collection and pay for laws to be passed limiting the ability to offshore work. It's time we admit that the only way to get anything passed in Congress is to pay for it, and lobbyists are the equivalent of handing lawmakers paper bags of money.

To make this fair to employers, they would need to get something too. I would say the best approach would be to promise no union style work rules would be enforced, while quality would be maintained by self-regulation. I think it's horrible that someone can screw up a job so badly they get fired, then just clean up their resume and get another job without any repercussion -- and I've seen this happen many times. If companies could be assured that their job would get done without the need to bring it back onshore to clean it up at consulting rates, they'd be open to this possibility.

No 'professional organization' is going to stop free market forces. Many have tried, all fail eventually. What you're up against is labor arbitrage, brought about by the globalization of the workforce. It first started in blue-collar professions; with advances in technology it has moved to knowledge work as well. Instead of thinking about India being some distant country think of it like the business next door, competing for the business that your employer provides. Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company? Do you think passing a law that prevents the business next to yours from competing would ever work?

> Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company?

As someone who has seen bargain-basement Indian IT work from one of the big offshore body shops, because American IT workers are worth it.

All but two of the Indians I have worked with in the last 3 years have been fucking useless. They have no drive, no curiosity, and no initiative. If it's not in a runbook in front of them, they don't know how to do it. Hell, if it's a slight variation of something that IS in the

Ah yes. The free market. That wonderful ideal the true red-blooded 'murican idolizes, regardless of how hard or how often it bends them over. In fact, they beg for more as they continually elect these "real Americans" back into office again and again no matter how badly they get screwed by them.

The free market. Capitalism. Nonsense. It all ends up, one way or another, of stealing from you and giving to the few. I bet those company execs agonized terribly over doing this. I'm sure they all gave a sociopathic chuckle when they cooked up how they were going to shaft their employees while giving themselves a tasty little bonus since making 1000x the average worker just isn't enough to build a house made of money.

Many have tried, all fail eventually. What you're up against is labor arbitrage, brought about by the globalization of the workforce. It first started in blue-collar professions; with advances in technology it has moved to knowledge work as well. Instead of thinking about India being some distant country think of it like the business next door, competing for the business that your employer provides. Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company? Do you think passing a law that prevents the business next to yours from competing would ever work?

Of course not, because you know just as well as I do that any such legislation would either be lobbied into uselessness or have so many loopholes you'd swear it was a sweater. Congress is a free market. The lobbyists have known this for decades and the Supreme Court all but legalized paid for politicians. Few, if any, give a rat's ass about me, you, or the American people. As long as Wall Street keeps the money flowing into SuperPACS and Congressional pockets, they can continue the "Us vs. Them" bullshit and stay in office.

Aside from that though, you're argument is ridiculous. Basically you're saying if you accept the same pay as someone working in a third world shithole, you can keep your job. But you can't because in this country we actually have laws and regulations regarding health and pay, things that third world shitholes don't have to care about. Somehow, I don't think repealing labor laws and turning America into a land of suburban third world slums to feed the corporate fat asses their million dollar bonuses is going to work out well.

Listen ass-hole. H1B Visas are work Visas issued by the government. They are meant to SUPPLEMENT the US workforce not replace it. So Yes we can control it. You don't like it, you can fuck off. If businesses don't like it they can move their sorry ass to India or China or whatever 3rd world labor resource they are looking for.

They moved all of these IT jobs to Cognizant, which is a company made up almost entirely of H1bs. Cognizant is blatantly in violation of the H1b laws, and if they are taken down, as they should be, all of the companies that are depending on Cognizant for outsourced labor will be up a creek without a paddle.

I don't know what the situation was like at that company in particular.

But having worked for and with a few large companies, it's not that hard to imagine why they were offshored - the article mentions the company "needed a more flexible staffing model that could better serve the cyclical nature of our business". I'm pretty sure from seeing other IT departments in action, that they in fact could not handle bursting kinds of workload, nor a cyclical business that ebbed and flowed to a large degree. IT departments are typically extremely rigid, and scared of even the smallest change.

IT as a role in a company must evolve or die off altogether. It must change to a form that truly helps a business instead of shackling it.

If you're not sure who Cengage is, they're one of the the companies that charges $300 for a college Intro Physics textbook and then locks half the content and all the problems behind a website that requires a one-time-use registration card, so that used textbooks are worthless.

... If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?...

The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money

The point being that the jobs that got outsourced are jobs that are no longer creating enough added value to keep them inside a high-wage location, such as Ohio, USA

Even at Silicon Valley there are jobs that have been outsourced, but if we examine what kind of jobs that had been outsourced and which jobs still remain we will find that the jobs still remain (and are still being created) in America are jobs that are heavy on the side of creativity

Data entry jobs, even some of those so-called 'programming' jobs have become so routine it no longer makes any sense to employ people doing this low-value jobs in America

In other words, if you are Americans and still want to work in America, find yourself a niche, a niche which add a lot of value to what you do, a niche that no one outside of America can easily duplicate, and you will get to enjoy your job as long as what you do creates more money to your employer than what they pay you every month

You guys may not like what I am saying, but we need to face the reality somehow --- this world's competitiveness has heat up tremendously. USA and Europe are no longer the only places in the world where innovations happen

Except this is bullshit. Consumers only benefit from reduced prices to a point because they have to be able to afford fixed costs such as insurance, food, and rent. Fixed costs that have skyrocketed in recent years. An iPhone being 20$ less means nothing to a family that may have 100$ a month in discretionary income after taxes.

The healthiest economies in the world are the ones that rigorously maintain the middle class because the amount of money in the global economy means precisely dick after people's fixed costs are being met. What matters most to the economy is that money is able to freely flow through as many people as possible because when money changes hands value is created. This isn't about a few hundred thousand jobs. This is about entire communities being impacted because the buying power of the average american is being undermined by cost cutting measures, and as more and more people approach their discretionary income margins the more the economy suffers as there is less capital for luxuries and investment in new technologies.

It is simply stupid to suggest that the economy losing middle class jobs is somehow a benefit.

Nonsense. It isn't a company behaving rationally. It's executives who know that making the company bottom line look better for a few quarters means big bonuses. They can then move on with a great story about how the great job they did before the company crashes and burns.

Will be sealed with the advent of better systems and automation technologies. Most of the jobs that go to India are menial tasks which require no or very little skill.The core stuff still happens in the west. There are extremely few kernel programmers in India. So think these layoffs as having been replaced by a robot.

Software development requires "no or very little skill"?I suppose an attitude like that explains why some software is utter shit and why we are neck deep in malware, but I would suggest that software fit for purpose requires skilled developers.

have you been to India lately ? The educational institutions there are tuned to IT outsourcing . I'm not talking of the oldies like Vinod Khosala but the new crop . Cognizant does not do kernel programming nor does Infosys and the etc .

I dunno about Khosla, but there are 2 types of Indians. The ones who came here on F1 visas, studies here, joined the workforce here and settled down. That group is more compatible w/ the American way of doing business, and have the same business culture as the rest of America. That group is not a part of the outsourcing crowd.

The other are the employees in India of the Infosys's, Wipros, HCLs and Mahindras who are employees of those companies' main i.e. Indian branches, and who are sent here on H1Bs.

India will eventually take ALL IT jobs, including kernel programming and supercomputing applications.

Have you ever been to India? The people you're talking about, the ones that work on the well manicured corporate campuses, are less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the Indian population. The majority of Indians still live in poverty, practice marginal farming or other forms of subsistence living, defecate in the open and have less than an 8th grade education. The Indian government goes to great lengths to hide these facts from the world. They want you to see the glittering IT campus handling all of the outsourced

A better choice would be to cut the h1b program and start an immediate investigation of the companies involved. But what will happen instead is an expansion and our political class looking the other way.

Wonder what Trump and Carly think? If Carly opposes it, she'd have to explain why she presumably supported it while in HP. The Don has said that he's for all immigration that's done legally! Just b'cos he's fond of the wall and wants to end illegal immigration doesn't imply that's he's opposed to legal immigration as well

Dr Ben has talked about the need to get the entire US population productive to match the likes of India & China. Would like to see his proposals

...you say until your job is off-shored, and you can't find another one because they've all been off-shored too.

Professional organization doesn't mean union. It means lobby group. Less focussed on helping individuals with their specific conditions and pay - no direct contact with an employer - but focussed on highlighting the issues, raising awareness of the benefits of a good, strong, local IT workforce, and playing the campaign donation game.

Most professional Americans have a total combined (embedded direct tax) load of over 60% - good luck trying to compete against Indians in that kind of regime. An IT-focused lobbying group is not going to be tackling the correct issues; protectionism cannot effectively compete against market pricing forces.

Those unions worked great for manufacturing and prevented having those jobs go overseas, didn't they.

A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone tells me he makes a point to study weekly, constantly learning. Anyone who is concerned about the level of outsourcing and illegal H1-B usage might keep that in mind.

Recruiters will take any warm body they can shoehorn into a job, as long as 1 or 2 of the required acronyms appear on your resume.

I'm always flabbergasted by people who say the job market must be great, because of all the recruiters calling them. First of all, those recruiters all get the same leads so you may be contacted by 3 or 4 for the same job. Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend. They are there to make money by supplying "human capital" to the Evil HR departments who haven't a clue about how to find good qualified people themselves.

Recruiters are nothing but leeches. They have a huge turnover rate because nobody in the game can stand the stink for long.

> Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend.

They get paid their commission if and when they provide the best candidate, the one who gets hired. Twice, a call from a recruiter has resulted in a job offer that doubled my take-home pay - that's pretty friendly in my book. Of course my experience may be different from yours because as I said I make it a point to study my field weekly, not to bitch and moan about "the e

If the US stops being the world's consumer of last resort there will be no one to take it's place. The global race to the bottom wage wise can not work, someone has to leech away rent/income away from capital and give it to consumers. It might be better if the redistribution was more equitable globally, but it would be far worse if it wasn't there at all.

us citizens are the most overworked people. They have long days, work a lot, low wages and very good 'value for the money'. But you americans buy all the US corporate propaganda and sell out your rights because maybe you'll be the one getting rich by a fluke chance somewhere in the future. Egoism, everyone for themselves results in this.

The funniest thing is that taxes are pretty high in the USA, but instead of producing services and regulations helping citizens, it ends up in social services for corporatio

Fine, as long as all C-level pay is drastically cut as well. Unless you truly think most CEOs are dozens to thousands of times more productive than a lowly employee to be getting their hugely inflated salaries.

Sorry, but it's not being greedy to actually want non-stagnant wages when CEOs are making record salaries.